How exactly are top B2B companies able to maintain huge success stories? Well, a great portion of it can be attributed to creating a tough sales pipeline.
Marketers are no doubt aware of the central role the sales pipeline plays in business. However, as competition gets tougher, the involvement of the B2B sales team further increases along with the need for better sales strategies to ensure a robust pipeline.
So, what can you do to improve your sales pipeline? Well, you can start by employing some efficient sales strategies.
To help you get started, here are 11 B2B sales strategies worth implementing, if you’re looking at building a better sales pipeline for your business.
1. Map out an Intensive Research
In order to successfully refine any sales process, it’s crucial to study your market comprehensively. Be it company size, the number of site visits, or page landings, looking after the prospect’s needs can be a huge deal-breaker.
Although generating targeted leads can be a difficult and complicated process, because of increasing competition, understanding their challenges can truly impact their decision.
2. Training the Sales Team
A study from Forbes reveals an estimated 61% of reps find their sales managers lacking in terms of managing a sales pipeline. The study also revealed how well-oriented managers had better revenue (by about 23%) as opposed to those without.
This means training your sales team concerning pipeline management is a must and ensuring the involvement of each of your team members in the sales process is a great start.
It’s not very ideal to leave reps in the dark. As a business, your team should be aware of the action items involved in each sales process stage.
3. Embrace Sales Enablement
Yes, we’re all aware of how buyers today are extremely confident with conducting their research but that doesn’t mean interaction with you during the process should be limited.
In fact, in our case, it is quite the opposite.
Because here’s the thing: B2B buyers depend on content for guiding them into the buying process and gaining the knowledge required in making an informed decision. Although information can be easily found, it’s not always the correct proper information.
4. Encourage Salespeople as the Brands Spokesperson
Curating relevant content isn’t the only way of overcoming B2B sales challenges. Another apt strategy of working through this is positioning your very own salespeople as the field experts.
And here’s the reason why:
We’re all aware of the fact that modern B2B buyers have become more skeptical regarding sales & marketing messages.
Plus, tons of B2B buyers prefer interacting with salespeople that attend to their needs while also providing relevant information.
So, with your salespeople as the field experts, it’ll help draw a much larger audience
5. Automate and Minimize Administrative Tasks
Sales reporting is no doubt the backbone of the sales process but, administrative work can be extremely time-consuming.
According to a study conducted on salespersons (North-American), it was found that salespersons spent only about 36 percent of their time on selling while the remaining time was put on dealing with administration, making reports, etc.
This is where sales automating tools can come in extremely handy. By automating tasks, sales emails are easily composed while sales forecasting can aid in determining future revenue along with close rates via the pipeline activity.
6. Align your Sales & Marketing Teams
According to studies, companies with misaligned sales and marketing can lose about 10% of their revenue annually.
However, 56% of companies that aligned both teams reached their revenue goals and even exceeded them.
This clearly shows just how beneficial sales & marketing team alignment can be for your business. Moreover, it also increases brand awareness along with annual company revenue & average deal size.
7. Make Use of Content for Aligning the Teams
Research from Corporate Visions discovered how very few businesses incorporated sales teams in content creation and messaging.
Now, that doesn’t sound very nice. So, how can you do things differently?
Well, you can start by creating a content library. This is where you can encourage marketing teams to contribute assets routinely so that salespeople can utilize them in generating better lead quality.
Remember to let marketers educate the sales teams on the use of content along with hosting frequent meetings between the two for improved coordination.
8. Employ Account-Based Marketing
When it comes to sales, providing a personalized & consistent experience throughout all of their touch points and at each step of their buyer journey.
All of that becomes possible through account-based marketing – something that’s highly utilized in B2B marketing. As something that requires you to personalize the assets of each account, ABM can pave way for you to become entirely relevant to buyers.
Nurturing these targeted members using proper marketing messages accelerates the sales cycle. This in turn can assist the sales team in achieving higher close rates.
9. Utilize Clean Lead Database
There are several instances where incorrect or wrong prospect information can entirely botch any sales endeavor. Now, this is something that will negatively affect the health of your sales pipeline as reps will likely be unable to contact the right prospects.
To ensure this doesn’t happen, you can utilize those accessible tools in your CRM for preserving a cleaner database. You can also try out features such as duplicate lead merging for better data cleaning.
10. Follow-Up on Your Leads
Today, purchasers have a greater opportunity in choosing from numerous options as compared to before. This means that somewhere between your first and the next meeting, your prospects will likely be pampered with similar offers from competitors.
Hence, one simple solution to keep each of your prospects in the loop is following upon them. But calling frequently isn’t enough, try using various communication channels for communicating further.
11. Listen More
Believe it or not, listening is quite crucial in businesses, instead of stacking up piles of questions, it’s good to divert some attention to the feedbacks and reiterate what prospects have to say about your business.
This makes them feel at ease and a sense that your business cares about them. When you’re communicating with potential clients, make sure to keep it simple. It may sound like a long shot but it will offer better close rates.
Final Thoughts
The reason why you shouldn’t overestimate the importance of sales pipeline is due to the fact that it’s basically your business’ lifeblood. This means the lack of proper sales pipeline can lead to losing tons of potential customers.
Hence, implementing these strategies can boost the health of your sales pipeline. As sales pipeline can be an excellent tool for visualizing the sales process of your business, adopting the right sales strategies can further enhance this tool.